Belated Happy Birthday to Me! – Advice Needed

THANK YOU x 1,000,000!!! For all the nice Birthday comments, wishes, messages, notes, calls, emails, cards and text. I read every single one of them and wish I had time to write everyone of you back personally!

We celebrated by going to Tucanos. It seemed like everyone at Tucanos was having a birthday. That’s probably because they give out a free meal on your birthday! We’ve never done it before because I never remember to sign up but I was so happy when I got my free meal card in the mail. Micah got in free so we really only had to pay for Dallin’s meal. It was awesome and super yummy Brazilian Churrasco.

After Tucanos, we played games with neighbors. We played the Celestial Marriage Pursuit game. It was a funny Mormon version of the Newlywed game.

We also took Micah and Quentin to an indoor fun park this weekend. Micah enjoyed going on all the rides and insisted on riding the merry-go-round by himself! Dallin and I are way too big for the playground but the rules said that kids under the age of 3 needed to have parental supervision the whole time. So we took turns going into the jungle gym with him. Dallin had fun but my knees just hurt.

Funny side story — I was crawling in one of the longer tunnels and I was really struggling. My face probably looked really scary because a little kid coming from the other direction said to me “Can you not make that face?” [Blahahaha!] At the time I didn’t think it was so funny cause I really felt like I was stuck in the tunnel so I said to him “Sorry I cannot” with the same facial expression and crawled as fast as I could out of that tunnel.

Anyways… I need your help! I got a new set of the 2013 edition of the scriptures for my Birthday. My old set was falling apart. I read these books pretty much everyday for the last 6 years! I’ve taken my scriptures around the world with me. I treasure the scriptures and I honestly just can’t go a day without reading them. I sometimes read scriptures on my phone or iPad but I LOVE reading scriptures while holding a physical book. I don’t think I can ever give that up books even in the digital age.

My question is: How do you mark up your scriptures? I’m trying to figure out how to mark my new ones up.

As far as marking scriptures go…I actually just read digital scriptures now on my kindle so I mark them all up there, but one cool thing we did on my mission was highlight every single time a name of the savior is mentioned in the Book of Mormon. It was really enlightening to see how often He came up and all the different ways He is referred to.

so…I have a lot of ways that I mark my scriptures. In my main set, I follow the pattern that I explain in this blog post.

I also use other sets of scriptures all the time when I’m working on little projects. For example, right now, I’m studying the Atonement in the Book of Mormon. For this project, I have one of the “missionary” sets of scriptures, and I’m using a color code. You can find out about the project here.

If you’re interested, I also have a free eBook here, and it has a section on color coding. It gives you practical ideas and ways for you to determine your own marking system – it is important to do what works for you!!!

Happy birthday to you!!! :)
We’re actually having the same “problem” this week, as I also got my knees hurt when I chased my toddler around the tunnels of the indoor playground…those thing, why can’t they make a better version of it?! Haha…parent’s problem I guess :D

I’m sorry I missed your birthday, but I am glad to hear that it was well celebrated. Congratulations on another successful trip around the sun.

About the scriptures, I have gone through several sets myself, warn them out, in English and in Spanish (I was a missionary in Spain). That is a wonderful thing. And I did a lot of marking. I had groups of scriptures organized by theme with a key scripture passage, I had scripture chains (where one passage was then linked to another and then to another, all in a particular order to deliver a message), and I had some notes carefully penciled in the margins.

Today, after several decades, I still treasure those volumes and still have them and occasionally consult them. But I noticed a problem, and that was that when I heavily marked the scriptures I tended to read the marked passages the same way. Yet, the scriptures are deeper than that, and marking them too much made it hard for me to learn new meaning from those passages. Today, my current set of scriptures still has a few markings (mostly to help me teach from them), but far fewer than my earlier sets. That allows me to discover new and deeper meanings as I read familiar passages again.

I would say, though, that the most important things are not to be afraid to mark your scriptures, and be sure to mark them in the way that works best for you and your study and teaching.

Wow what great in sight! I agree that when I have too much notes… I read those and it gets distracting from receiving new revelation! I am having a good time with my new scriptures but you’re right I’m a little bit afraid to mark them. I’ve only marked one scripture so far! I’m starting to go through the updated scripture mastery.

I just remembered that I was going to reply to this when you first posted, but I never did. You may have decided on a system that you like by now, but just in case, I’ll give my thoughts. When I bought myself new scriptures a few years ago, I decided several categories ahead of time that I was interested in (family, work, humility, etc) and gave them each a color from my colored pencils. Whenever I came across a scripture that was about one of these (or in some cases, the opposite – like pride instead of humility) I marked it with that color. This worked well for awhile, until I started finding new categories while I was reading, and then ran out of colors! I got a little stressed about it, and actually stopped marking for awhile. (I didn’t stop reading though!) :)

What I would do in the future, would be to choose several topics that I wanted to mark specifically, but then have a standard color (probably red) to mark anything else that stood out to me. In fact, maybe I’ll continue marking those scriptures using this method!

I think I’ve said this before, but your blog really is nice. It’s very uplifting, and I love the pictures!

I totally did that too!! I did all the colors with my first set. The beginning of my scriptures were pretty but then it gets to Alma 5 and it’s all blank cause I just couldn’t keep up with it! LOL. Thanks so much for the thoughts and comments. I love your blog too. Sorry it took so long for me to write back I’ve been having computer troubles.

OK, that’s too funny – after I read this, I had to go look at my scriptures to see where I stopped color coding. And guess what? I had stopped at the end of Mosiah! So you made it further than me! :) I really hope everything gets better with your computer!

LDS Temples by May Bo Hubbard

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